“Resident Alien” by Alex Pruteanu

I
was born in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week, in the
middle of the year, in the middle of the twentieth century. I checked in
screaming and gurgling, bloody red and violet with revolt and anger.
What I really wanted to do was to delay everything by nineteen years, so
I could be held up to the window looking at the moon while Armstrong
lowered his foot into the powdery surface and uttered those famous words
about small steps and giant steps. But I didn’t have the call on that. I
came when I came.

The man who delivered me named me, in spite of my mother’s wishes. I
was meant to be christened after Saint Paul. Instead, the obstetrician,
who had a limited knowledge of history but a passion for chess and
Ottoman Empire coffee, declared me a world conqueror. But what he didn’t
realize in his atheist, intellectual pseudo-statement was that he named
me for a saint after all. There are so many of them, you’re bound to
hit a target if you just merely chuck the rock.

My mother, after being handed the blue and bloody baby, immediately
asked for a cigarette. And then she held me to her breast, as was
customary and to save face, because I was ugly. I had a crooked nose. It
was almost fused to the left side of my cheekbone from having passed
through the birth canal obtusely, in a hard, twenty-six-hour labour. In
the coming weeks my father would “exercise” my snout, bending it first
toward the opposite side, then slowly back to the center. Eventually it
would be straight. And big. I took my paternal grandfather’s Greek
proboscis. My father would claim victory over the defect. Victory
through persistence and practice. My father would claim many things.

“Give me a cigarette, Yuri!”

Yuri, the obstetrician who delivered me was a substitute—on call that
Wednesday afternoon. The man in whose pre-natal care my mother had been
entrusted by the government the last thirty-nine weeks was on holiday
at the Black Sea. At the moment I presented myself smeared in
fetoplacental circulatory blood and matter, he was rolling a double-six
on the backgammon board at a café in the coastal town of Eforie. His
opponent, a Turk from Izmir who sold fur pelts from a kiosk at night,
and corn on the cob from a steaming bucket during the hot days on the
beach, had just raised the odds to 32. The instant double-sixes had
settled on the board, I wailed with my first breath in a sterile room,
two hundred kilometers to the west.

And that’s when my mother insisted on having a Kent.

–

I had fluid in my lungs. But there was nothing they could do about it
save holding me upside down a few minutes every hour, letting the
yellowish substance trickle down. Nowadays they call the condition
Transient Tachypnea of the Newborn, and if you happen to check in with
it, they stick all kinds of tubes down your throat and take blood
samples every four hours, pricking your little, newborn heels and
squeezing the drops into a vile.

After they wiped me down, they took me away, and my mother and father
did not see me for three weeks. During her recovery, my mother ate
fatty chicken soup with pieces of skin floating in the bowl.

My father was a good cook. He had learned basic peasant cooking
techniques living eighteen years in his birth village in the northeast,
just on the border with the U.S.S.R. He’d learned how to make polenta
with chunks of head cheese, and stuff ground meat into pork casings as a
boy, to help out his mother who would have to deal with her abusive,
alcoholic husband most nights. Later my father would eat the same greasy
broth, as he lay in a hospital bed with half his colon cut away by a
negligent doctor.

In the weeks that the hospital cared for me, giving me oxygen and
continuous positive airway pressure, my mother learned how to fold and
wash diapers in icy cold water, tightly swaddle a baby despite
excruciatingly hot July weather, and from the pediatrician assigned to
her by the state, she dutifully noted that, in order to keep me on
schedule and under control, she should insert suppositories into my
rectum every four to six hours.

–

My Greek maternal grandfather was called Xenofon Panaides. He was a
strange, tall, Renaissance man trapped in the wrong half of the century,
in the wrong country. He worked for decades in quality control at a
rivets factory in Ploesti before the Allies bombed the refineries of the
city in 1942. He was a daydreamer before the world had heard of Walter
Mitty. He played himself in chess during his lunch breaks on a small,
foldable board he had manufactured out of old shoe boxes and fabric in
his outdoor kitchen, with pieces he had carved out of wood every Sunday
for sixteen months. He taught himself English from old Hornby books, and
had begun the daunting task of translating every work by Shakespeare
into Romanian–for his own pleasure. He wrote short plays and stories,
the manuscripts of which he kept in a large box under his bed and which
no one read while he was alive. (Hardly anyone read them after he died)
He studied the violin and could play Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the
Bumblebee” with amazing speed and accuracy. He adored Herbert von
Karajan and often listened to his beloved phonograph record of the
Vienna Philharmonic’s version of “Faust.” But what grandfather Panaides
loved the most was photography. Later, as a retired man slowly worked
down by lung cancer, he would wake up at four in the morning, get on his
bicycle, and pedal furiously out of town to catch the sunrise over the
still charred oil fields at Brazi. Once, he got as far as Targoviste for
a shot which he later over developed in his improvised darkroom. He
failed to mix a proper stop bath and when he poured the working solution
into the developing tank, the solution failed to neutralize the
developer and arrest the developing process.

–

When I was almost six, he taught me the Latvian Gambit:
1. e4 e5
2. Nf3 f5
At this point several possible moves by White have been studied, of which the most important are:

3.Nxe5 – the main line. Now after the usual 3…Qf6 (3…Nc6?!, the
so-called “Corkscrew Counter Gambit”, is also known, to which 4.d4! is a
good response), White chooses between 4. d4 d6 5. Nc4 fxe4 and the
immediate 4. Nc4, which has the advantage of allowing White to open the
center with d3, for example 4…fxe4 5.Nc3 Qg6?! 6.d3 exd3? 7. Bxd3 Qxg2?
and now White is winning after 8. Qh5 + Kd8 (or 8…g6 9. Qe5 + and 10.
Be4) 9. Be4.

(Twenty-eight years later, American grandmaster Joel Benjamin will claim that this sensible developing move refutes the Latvian:
3.exf5
3.d4)

In his outdoor kitchen on a shelf high above the stove, grandfather
Panaides had an impossibly thick book of problems, combinations, and
games edited by Polgár. The few times he hauled it down and allowed me
to thumb through it very carefully and methodically, I smelled mildew
and bacon rising off the yellow, delicate pages. The acrid odor made me
sneeze every time. In the unabridged chess bible, I came across the
names of Mikhail Botvinnik, Samuel Reshevsky, Herman Steiner, Arthur
Bisquier, and a strange American named Robert Fisher.

In May 1949, the six-year-old Fischer learned how to play chess from
instructions found in a chess set that was bought at a candy store below
his Brooklyn apartment. He saw his first chess book a month later. For
over a year he played chess on his own. At age seven, he began to play
chess seriously, joining the Brooklyn Chess Club and receiving
instruction from its president, Carmine Nigro.

In June, 1955 Grandfather Panaides taught me the Latvian Gambit. And
across the Atlantic Ocean, in a country which Grandfather Panaides had
loved ever since he was a boy, but which he would never see in his
lifetime, Bobby Fisher joined the Manhattan Chess Club, one of the
strongest in the world.

–

My other grandfather, dad’s dad, couldn’t grasp the reasonable and
beautiful logic of chess. The head wounds he’d suffered in World War II
as an infantry man left him with the inability to see or understand the
diagonal, and so the Bishop, the Queen, and the King were rendered
useless. As well, the en passant. Dad’s dad was conscripted
into the Romanian army on 29 November, 1940—just four days after the
country joined the Axis by signing the Tripartite Pact. In July, 1941
during a break in action on the Eastern front, his helmet off, he
straightened himself out of the trench to light a cigarette. The Russian
sniper bullet came in from the forest line, a kilometer away, and had
it been a few millimeters lower dad’s dad would’ve taken his last breath
on earth inhaling a shitty Marasesti cigarette. The second time he was
clipped by a deadly piece of lead was in May, 1944 at the Battle of
Targul Frumos when the Romanians were forced to switch sides and become
allies of the Soviets. This time the bullet took out a piece of skull
and left a trench running from the top of his forehead to the back of
the head. Thus dad’s dad had the only distinction of being shot twice in
the head by either warring side, and having survived both times.

Though dad’s dad couldn’t grasp the rules of chess, he excelled at
backgammon—a game I finally learned at the age of thirty-five, living in
Damascus, Maryland with a woman who had been in such a horrific car
accident that the imprint of the Pontiac’s steering wheel insignia was
visible on her sternum two years after the awful wreck. She and I played
endless best-of-seven tournaments, while she was convalescing.

–

Grandfather Panaides loved dark chocolate. Every time he came to
Bucharest to stay and visit with us in the small flat he brought a thick
bar just for me. Chocolate, especially the dark kind, was extremely
expensive and very hard to find in those times (any basic food was), and
so he deduced that its rareness and exceptional quality would make the
perfect (semi) sweet present for a child. I hated it. I barely tolerate
it now. But I was told, via a leather belt to the thighs, to make
concessions. We all lived within concessions then.

My country was a land of contradictions. We did not have water three
days per week, yet we owned a West German Water Pik. (In spite of that I
had the most horrendous cavities as a child and later, in America,
would need months of painful, follow-up work for crowns and bridges and
root canals, coincidentally done by Dr. Janas, a Greek immigrant living
comfortably in Elyria, Ohio and a friend of a friend of my pediatrician
in Bucharest).

We did not have religion (the State was officially atheist) but we
went to church every Christmas and Easter eve and held lit candles in
silent vigil alongside hundreds of faithful followers. Our priests were
secret police informers, but were trusted with even the basic secrets
like showing up for mass (men of cloth kept detailed notes on who was
present at their sermons).

The government required every citizen to be a member of the Communist
Party, yet both my parents didn’t carry party cards. They had fallen
through a loophole, which allowed all students from age 6 to be part of a
socialist pioneer youth union—and when they finished their higher
studies at university, they fell through the bureaucratic cracks of the
Communist system via membership in a student socialist labour movement,
and never officially graduated into the Party.

There were dozens and dozens more contradictions like that and we
lived among all of them, traversing and hopping around and on them like
frogs playing hopscotch on water lilies. The one that makes me laugh
even now is our car. We owned a sparkling new Dacia 1300, a Renault
knockoff, which basically stood parked on the street under a canvas
cover, weathered with yellow and grey stains, for years. My father took
out the battery the day the car was bought, and placed it under the sink
in our kitchen where it lived until he and I emigrated. We had no food,
but we had a brand new car which we never used. Many things made no
sense. But we accepted them. We lived in the absurd, which rendered us
cynical but forgiving. It also instilled in us a fantastic sense of
humour, although it seems something was lost in the transmission between
generations and I ended up basically unable to deliver even a
knock-knock joke.